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A while back I made mention of Phyllis Diller, and the fact my mother was a fan of hers. This weekend we watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and by chance Diller appears in it for a few moments.
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The next video in the Petula series is from the 1949 movie, The Huggetts Abroad; abroad being South Africa. This song, “Doodle Oodle Day”, is even sillier than the nonsensical “Walking Backwards” in the previous post.
Yikes! It’s been over two months since I posted part 2 of this movie. In part 3 it’s apparent where the look of the sets in Star Trek came from. Director Byron Haskin recycled the spaceships and sound effects from his earlier film, War of the Worlds.
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As promised, here is the start of a Petula Clark video retrospective. This brief scene is from 1948, with Pet at 15 in Here Come the Huggetts, the first in a series about the fictional Huggetts family.
Pet was England’s “Singing Sweetheart,” and she seems here to be a cross between Shirley Temple and Judy Garland. She carries it off, but having sifted through more than 30 video clips of Petula, it seems she had to be quite a chameleon to keep her career moving. I would conjecture the real Petula didn’t show herself until she was closing in on 40.
My twin sister Jean and I caught up with the “Paul is Dead” phenomenon when it was picked up by WKBW in Buffalo, NY. The rumor got traction when Roby Yonge on WABC (about which there is more here) in NYC got himself fired for promoting the idea that Paul McCartney had been killed.
The audio player below has an aircheck of Yonge from October 21, 1969. Part 1 starts with his first mention of the speculation that Paul McCartney was dead, and part 2 ends with the moment he was replaced on the air by Les Marchak.
Yonge, working the overnight shift, was fired for breaking format, as it’s called in the radio biz. But ‘KBW followed ABC’s lead by running with the story, presenting every single alleged clue, in a heavily-promoted special presentation. I didn’t believe it, but I learned a valuable lesson about how easily people can be misled into believing something that is completely untrue when conjecture is presented as fact.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/pauldead.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/pauldead2.mp3]One of the clues was the infamous “turn me on dead man” that was heard when “Revolution 9” was played backwards. Here is the first minute of the track, presented backwards, followed by the opening seconds with George Martin and Apple Corps publicist Derek Taylor apparently having a disagreement.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/Revolution9.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/GeorgeMartin.mp3]
When I was a kid, Petula Clark songs were special. The records had a characteristic sound that was somehow European, but less obviously so than Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger,” which was produced by George Martin. I suppose the psychoacoustic effect of Petula Clark could have have been due to Tony Hatch’s production values, but at the center of it all was Petula, who was attractive to a wide audience, from pre-teens to their grandparents.
Petula Clark, who has had one of the most interesting careers of any singer, was something of a counterpoint to Julie Andrews. Clark and Andrews met in the 1940’s, and while both excelled in acting and singing, Andrews later specialized in musicals while Pet was a singer of Pop tunes.
Back in 1967 an audio essay by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould on the CBC included a segment on Petula Clark. Gould is more than a bit pretentious, but nevertheless this is worth hearing if for no other reason than it’s a critical consideration of Pet from her heyday on the charts, by a professional Classical musician.
[audio:http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/gould_glenn/Gould-Glenn_The-Search-for-Petula-Clark_1967.mp3|titles=Glenn Gould: The Search for Petula Clark]Every so often I’ll be posting more video clips of the fascinating Petula Clark, picking up where I started with this scene from one of her first movies, I Know Where I’m Going! by Powell and Pressburger.
